Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    The Story of Looking review: A new film examines the visual world

    By Elle Hunt

    Mark Cousins has an eye for making innovative filmsBofa Productions
    The Story of Looking
    Mark Cousins
    In cinemas from 17 SeptemberAdvertisement
    NOT long before I watched The Story of Looking, I was shown an image of the inside of my eye. At my annual sight check-up, I’d agreed to something called an optical coherence tomography scan, examining the surface of my retina for abnormalities.
    One picture resembled a red sun, lined with veins; the cross-section view revealed undulating layers like those of Earth’s crust. I looked at my eye, and my eye looked back. Thinking about it, I started to feel a little queasy. It is this visceral, charged relationship between being and seeing – how what we take in of the world shapes our understanding of it – that Mark Cousins explores in his personal, exploratory film.
    The Story of Looking extends his 2017 book of the same name to bring together medium and message, as he did a decade ago with The Story of Film: An Odyssey, his 15-hour epic on the history of cinema. At 90 minutes long, his new offering is relatively glancing, but in some ways just as ambitious in attempting to tell “the story of our looking lives”.
    The film begins with a clip of musician Ray Charles, who went blind aged 7, being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show in the US in 1972. Given the option, he would refuse to have his sight permanently restored, but might consider it for one day, he says. “There are a couple of things that I would maybe like to see, once.”.
    The idea that a person might choose not to see floors Cousins, as “somebody who has always loved looking”. He makes sense of his life through visual markers – some undeniable, such as the sight of his late grandmother in an open coffin, but many more apparently inconsequential: a sunrise, a tree outside his bedroom window, a glimpse of his neighbour.
    But the ephemeral nature of this “visual world” was thrown into relief by his discovery, during lockdown last year, of a cataract in his left eye. The parallel between the pandemic curtailing his experience and the potential of his failing vision to do the same isn’t lost on Cousins, who sets out to capture what sight has meant to him. “Where do I begin to tell the story of my looking?” he wonders on the day before cataract surgery.
    “Why do I take selfies? Why has that tree, that panorama, that particular image stayed with me for years?”
    Inspired by the artist Paul ézanne’s description of his developing “optical experience”, Cousins traces his own, starting with his earliest memories – by extension, his earliest sights. The intimacy of this is emphasised by our own view of Cousins, shirtless in bed, curtains drawn: shut inside with him, we see what he sees, if only in his mind’s eye. He even projects into the future, beyond his surgery, to bring this “journey through our visual lives” full circle.
    The Story of Looking is essayistic in form, even impressionistic, combining personal experience, wide-ranging references and globe-trotting footage from Cousins’s archives to create a kaleidoscopic picture.
    Some of this, such as Cousins reading aloud responses to his tweeted request for thoughts on looking, isn’t that captivating to watch. But the evocativeness of his followers’ words, and Cousins’s emotional response to them – especially at a time of enforced isolation – underscores his point: we don’t need to be present, or together, to see for ourselves.
    Likewise, if the film’s meditative pace sometimes fails to hold the attention, it feels like an extension of Cousins’s challenge to our preconceptions – of what we consider to be “worth seeing”, or what we believe we must “bear witness” to. “Blurs are failures, aren’t they?” he says, of his cataract.
    Just as the film-maker’s looming surgery causes him to reflect on what he has seen, “to go around the city for a day with my eyes wide open”, The Story of Looking prompts me to see my own “visual world” anew. Why do I take selfies? Why has that tree, that panorama, that particular image stayed with me for years?
    The effect is oddly uplifting, as though my own aperture has been enlarged. Indeed, it casts the news that I need a first pair of prescription glasses in a new light – as another chapter in my own story of looking.

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    in Humans

    Scientists are often cautious or wrong – and that’s OK

    We like to think that science can give us definitive answers to our questions, but uncertainty is a crucial part of the scientific process, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

    Humans

    | Comment

    15 September 2021

    By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

    Lidiia/Shutterstock
    EARLIER this month, science journalist Adam Mann reported a story for Science News that had one of my favourite headlines of 2021: “Astronomers may have seen a star gulp down a black hole and explode.”
    The article discusses a new paper, published in Science on 3 September, that describes observations of a supernova that were collected with the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. The strong radio signal observed in coordination with this event suggested to lead researcher Dillon Dong and his team that they should follow up using a different set of tools, this time through … More

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    in Humans

    The microbial gunk that hardens on teeth is revealing our deep past

    Plaque fossilises while we are still alive. Now, dental calculus is giving up the secrets of our ancient ancestors, from what they ate to how they interacted and evolved

    Humans

    15 September 2021

    By Graham Lawton

    Spencer Wilson
    IT IS the only part of your body that fossilises while you’re still alive,” says Tina Warinner at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
    To see what she is describing, stand in front of a mirror and examine the rear surfaces of your lower front teeth. Depending on your dental hygiene, you will probably see a thin, yellowish-brown line where the enamel meets the gum. This is plaque, a living layer of microbes that grows on the surface of teeth – or, more accurately, on the surface of older layers of plaque. If … More

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    in Humans

    Generation Covid: What the pandemic means for young people’s futures

    By Bobby Duffy

    Roberto Cigna
    TOO often discussion of generations descends into stereotypes and manufactured conflicts – avocado-obsessed, narcissistic millennials against selfish, wasteful baby boomers. Instead of serious analysis, we get apocryphal predictions about millennials “killing” everything from wine corks to the napkin industry.
    Such discourse wouldn’t be so worrisome if it didn’t sully genuine research into generational differences, a powerful tool to understand and anticipate societal shifts. They can provide unique and often surprising insights into how societies and individuals develop and change.
    That is because generational changes are like tides: powerful, slow-moving and relatively predictable. Once a generation is set on a course, it tends to continue, which helps us see likely futures. That is true even through severe shocks like war or pandemic, which tend to accentuate and accelerate trends. Existing vulnerabilities are ruthlessly exposed, and we are pushed further and faster down paths we were already on.
    We tend to settle into our value systems and behaviours during late childhood and early adulthood, so generation-shaping events have a stronger impact on people who experience them while coming of age. This is why it is vitally important to heed the lessons we learn by looking at previous generations so we can understand what the covid-19 pandemic will mean for those growing up through it, and use those insights to help Generation Covid meet the unprecedented challenges ahead.
    Some approaches that define swathes of the population purely on when people were born are closer to astrology than serious analysis. The type of generational analysis I use in my new book, Generations: Does when you’re born shape who you are?, however, is built … More

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    in Humans

    Younger generations are the most fatalistic about climate change

    By Bobby Duffy

    FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images
    The idea that younger generations care the most about the climate while older people downplay the issue and refuse to take action is a widespread myth, according to new research.
    To better understand differences between generations, including how they perceive one another and the biggest challenges of the day, my team at the Policy Institute at King’s College London and New Scientist commissioned a survey of more than 4000 people aged 18 and over in the US and UK. Responses were collected from 2 to 9 August.
    Previous research has made clear that one of the most pervasive and destructive generational myths is that older cohorts don’t care about the environment or social purpose more generally. The new survey shows how dangerously caricatured this is.Advertisement

    In the UK, over three-quarters of baby boomers – who are defined as those currently aged 56-76 –  agree that climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental issues are big enough problems that they justify significant changes to people’s lifestyles. This was as high as any other generation (see chart). Seven in 10 of this group say they are willing to make changes to their own lifestyle, completely in line with younger generations.
    Older generations are also less fatalistic than the young: only one in five baby boomers say there is no point in changing their behaviour to tackle climate change because it won’t make any difference, compared with a third of Generation Z – those aged 18-25. This is an important driver of how we act: a sense that all is already lost leads to inertia.
    But our study shows that people have a rather different impression of who thinks what: when we ask people which age group is most likely to say there is no point in changing their behaviour, the oldest group is the most likely to be picked out. We wrongly think they have given up. Social psychologists call this misconception “pluralistic ignorance”. It is an important effect, because it shapes our views of others.

    Older people’s concern isn’t just expressed with words, but reflected in their actions. We know from other studies that it is actually baby boomers and Generation X who are the most likely to have boycotted products. But our new study shows that also isn’t the perception. The majority of the public wrongly think it is Generation Z or millennials who are most likely to boycott products, and only 8 per cent pick out baby boomers and just 9 per cent choose Gen X.
    No contest
    It is no surprise that the public have the wrong impression. Endless articles and analyses paint the picture of a clean generational break in environmental concern and action, with a new cohort of young people coming through who will drive change, if only older people would stop blocking them. Time magazine, for example, called Greta Thunberg “an avatar in a generational battle” when it made her its Person of the Year in 2019.

    This isn’t just wrong, but dangerous, as it dismisses the real concern among large proportions of our economically powerful and growing older population.
    The aftermath of the pandemic means it is set to become harder, not easier, to think about the long term, as short-term needs become more pressing: we will need all the support we can get, and creating or exaggerating generational division won’t help.
    Sign up for Countdown to COP26, our free newsletter covering this crucial year for climate policy

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    in Humans

    Piles of animal dung reveal the location of an ancient Arabian oasis

    By Jake Buehler

    The piles of faeces made by rock hyraxes hold clues to our own pastNatalia Kuzmina / Alamy
    Fossilised piles of faeces, called middens, have revealed that a desert valley in Yemen was once a tropical oasis, which may have lasted in the dry region because of human land management practices.
    Today, Wadi Sana is a dry, rocky desert. We knew that between 11,000 and 5000 years ago, the Arabian peninsula and Sahara desert were wetter than they are now, and some lake-bed deposits suggested that grasslands and trees may have grown elsewhere in the interior … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    A supernova’s delayed reappearance could pin down how fast the universe expands

    A meandering trek taken by light from a remote supernova in the constellation Cetus may help researchers pin down how fast the universe expands — in another couple of decades.

    About 10 billion years ago, a star exploded in a far-off galaxy named MRG-M0138. Some of the light from that explosion later encountered a gravitational lens, a cluster of galaxies whose gravity sent the light on multiple diverging paths. In 2016, the supernova appeared in Earth’s sky as three distinct points of light, each marking three different paths the light took to get here.

    Now, researchers predict that the supernova will appear again in the late 2030s. The time delay — the longest ever seen from a gravitationally lensed supernova — could provide a more precise estimate for the distance to the supernova’s host galaxy, the team reports September 13 in Nature Astronomy. And that, in turn, may let astronomers refine estimates of the Hubble constant, the parameter that describes how fast the universe expands.

    The original three points of light appeared in images from the Hubble Space Telescope. “It was purely an accident,” says astronomer Steve Rodney of the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Three years later, when Hubble reobserved the galaxy, astronomer Gabriel Brammer at the University of Copenhagen discovered that all three points of light had vanished, indicating a supernova.

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    By calculating how the intervening cluster’s gravity alters the path the supernova’s light rays take, Rodney and his colleagues predict that the supernova will appear again in 2037, give or take a couple of years. Around that time, Hubble may burn up in the atmosphere, so Rodney’s team dubs the supernova “SN Requiem.”

    “It’s a requiem for a dying star and a sort of elegy to the Hubble Space Telescope itself,” Rodney says. A fifth point of light, too faint to be seen, may also arrive around 2042, the team calculates.

    In another Hubble image of the galaxy cluster MACS J0138.0-2155, the cluster split the light from a supernova into three points, SN1, SN2 and SN3. The other two points, SN4 and SN5, are predictions of where the light from the supernova will appear in future years.S. Rodney et al/Nature Astronomy 2021

    The predicted 21-year time delay — from 2016 to 2037 — is a record for a supernova. In contrast, the first gravitational lens ever found — twin images of a quasar spotted in 1979  — has a time delay of only 1.1 years (SN: 11/10/1979).

    Not everyone agrees with Rodney’s forecast. “It is very difficult to predict what the time delay will be,” says Rudolph Schild, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was the first to measure the double quasar’s time delay. The distribution of dark matter in the galaxy hosting the supernova and the cluster splitting the supernova’s light is so uncertain, Schild says, that the next image of SN Requiem could come outside the years Rodney’s team has specified.

    In any case, when the supernova image does appear, “that would be a phenomenally precise measurement” of the time delay, says Patrick Kelly, an astronomer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved with the new work. That’s because the uncertainty in the time delay will be tiny compared with the tremendous length of the time delay itself.

    That delay, coupled with an accurate description of how light rays weave through the galaxy cluster, could affect the debate over the Hubble constant. Numerically, the Hubble constant is the speed a distant galaxy recedes from us divided by the distance to that galaxy. For a given galaxy with a known speed, a larger estimated distance therefore leads to a lower number for the Hubble constant.

    This number was once in dispute by a factor of two. Today the range is much tighter, from 67 to 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec. But that spread still leaves the universe’s age uncertain. The frequently quoted age of 13.8 billion years corresponds to a Hubble constant of 67.4. But if the Hubble constant is higher, then the universe could be about a billion years younger.

    The longer it takes for SN Requiem to reappear, the farther from Earth the host galaxy is — which means a lower Hubble constant and an older universe. So if the debate over the Hubble constant persists into the 2030s, the exact date the supernova springs back to life could help resolve the dispute and nail down a fundamental cosmological parameter. More

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    in Humans

    Why cutting down on digging the garden can actually be good for soil

    By Clare Wilson

    SJ Images/Alamy
    OF ALL my garden tools, the one I have used most must be my trusty spade, a lovely small and light one with a comfortable wooden handle. But recently, it has been getting less action because I have been stepping up on the “no-dig” approach to gardening.
    All gardeners need to dig sometimes, of course, such as when making holes to put plants in or rooting out weeds. Traditional advice is that we should also turn over all the soil every autumn, to aerate it, improve drainage and mix in soil improvers like manure.
    For the past few years, though, … More